On September 26, 2012, Texas Instruments announced that they would wind down their operations in smartphone and tablet oriented OMAP chips and instead focus on embedded platforms. The fate of OMAP therefore remains uncertain.[1] On November 14, 2012, Texas Instruments announced that they would cut 1,700 jobs due to its shift from mobile to embedded platforms.[2]

The OMAP family consists of three product groups classified by performance and intended application:

High-performance applications processors

Basic multimedia applications processors

Integrated modem and applications processors

Further, two main distribution channels exist, and not all parts are available in both channels. The genesis of the OMAP product line is from partnership with cell phone vendors, and the main distribution channel involves sales directly to such wireless handset vendors. Parts developed to suit evolving cell phone requirements are flexible and powerful enough to support sales through less specialized catalog channels; some OMAP 1 parts, and many OMAP 3 parts, have catalog versions with different sales and support models. Parts that are obsolete from the perspective of handset vendors may still be needed to support products developed using catalog parts and distributor-based inventory management.

Recently, the catalog channels have received more focus, with OMAP35x and OMAP-L13x parts being marketed for use with various applications where capable and power-efficient processors are useful.

These are parts originally intended for use as application processors in smartphones, with processors powerful enough to run significant operating systems (such as Linux, Android or Symbian), support connectivity to personal computers, and support various audio and video applications.

The OMAP 1 family started with a TI-enhanced ARM core, and then changed to a standard ARM926 core. It included many variants, most easily distinguished according to manufacturing technology (130 nm except for the OMAP171x series), CPU, peripheral set, and distribution channel (direct to large handset vendors, or through catalog-based distributors). In March 2009, the OMAP1710 family chips are still available to handset vendors.

The 3rd generation OMAP, the OMAP 3[3] is broken into 3 distinct groups: the OMAP34x, the OMAP35x, and the OMAP36x. OMAP34x and OMAP36x are distributed directly to large handset (such as cell phone) manufacturers. OMAP35x is a variant of OMAP34x intended for catalog distribution channels. The OMAP36x is a 45 nm version of the 65 nm OMAP34x with higher clock speed.[4]

The video technology in the higher end OMAP 3 parts is derived in part from the DaVinci product line, which first packaged higher end C64x+ DSPs and image processing controllers with ARM9 processors last seen in the older OMAP 1 generation or ARM Cortex-A8.[5]

Not highlighted in the list below is that each OMAP 3 SoC has an "Image, Video, Audio" (IVA2) accelerator. These units do not all have the same capabilities. Most devices support 12 megapixel camera images, though some support 5 or 3 megapixels. Some support HD imaging.

The 4th generation OMAPs, OMAP 4430 (used on Google Glass[15]), 4460 (formerly named 4440),[16] and 4470 all use a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 CPU, with two ARM Cortex-M3 cores, as part of the "Ducati" sub-system,[17] for off-loading low-level tasks.[18][19][20] The 4430 and 4460 use a PowerVR SGX540 integrated 3D graphics accelerator, running at a clock frequency of 304 and 384 MHz respectively.[21] 4470 has a PowerVR SGX544 GPU that supports DirectX 9 which enables it for use in Windows 8 as well as a dedicated 2D graphics core for increased power efficiency up to 50-90%.[22] All OMAP 4 come with an IVA3 multimedia hardware accelerator with a programmable DSP that enables 1080p Full HD and multi-standard video encode/decode.[23][24][25][26][27] OMAP 4 uses ARM Cortex-A9's with ARM's SIMD engine (Media Processing Engine, aka NEON) which may have a significant performance advantage in some cases over Nvidia Tegra 2's ARM Cortex-A9s with non-vector floating point units.[28] It also uses a dual-channel LPDDR2 memory controller compared to Nvidia Tegra 2's single-channel memory controller.

GStreamer makes use of hardware acceleration through plugins provided by Texas Instruments. The API is DMAI (DaVinci Multimedia Application Interface).

These are marketed only to handset manufacturers. They are intended to be highly integrated, low cost chips for consumer products. The OMAP-DM series are intended to be used as digital media coprocessors for mobile devices with high megapixel digital still and video cameras.

The Image Signal Processor (ISP) is used to accelerate processing of camera images.

The OMAP L-1x parts are marketed only through catalog channels, and have a different technological heritage than the other OMAP parts. Rather than deriving directly from cell phone product lines, they grew from the video-oriented DaVinci product line by removing the video-specific features while using upgraded DaVinci peripherals. A notable feature is use of a floating point DSP, instead of the more customary fixed point one.

Tiva-C LaunchPad inexpensive self-contained, single-board microcontroller, about the size of a credit card but featuring an ARM Cortex M4 32-bit microcontroller at 80Mhz, able of doing some signal processing.